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American Zombie Gothic
The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture
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Book Presentation:
Zombie stories are peculiarly American, as the creature was born in the New World and functions as a reminder of the atrocities of colonialism and slavery. The voodoo-based zombie films of the 1930s and ’40s reveal deep-seated racist attitudes and imperialist paranoia, but the contagious, cannibalistic zombie horde invasion narrative established by George A. Romero has even greater singularity. This book provides a cultural and critical analysis of the cinematic zombie tradition, starting with its origins in Haitian folklore and tracking the development of the subgenre into the twenty-first century. Closely examining such influential works as Victor Halperin’s White Zombie, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and, of course, Romero’s entire “Dead” series, it establishes the place of zombies in the Gothic tradition.
Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
About the Author:
Kyle William Bishop is an associate professor of English and film studies and serves as the Honors Program Director at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. He has presented and published on a number of zombie-related texts and has authored two other monographs with McFarland.
Press Reviews:
"In this seminal study, Bishop navigates well the oil and water-like mix of serious analysis and zombie cinema. It isn’t often that one comes across Marxian dialectics and graphic descriptions of cannibalism in the same paragraph, but Bishop’s understated style makes it work"—Library Journal
"Fascinating"—Raising the Undead
"A very complete analysis of the evolution of the zombie in American cinema"—Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
See the publisher website: McFarland & Co
> From the same author:
The Post-Zombie (2025)
Essays on the Evolving Undead
Dir. C. Wylie Lenz, Angela Tenga and Kyle William Bishop
> On a related topic:
The Politics of Monstrous Figures in Contemporary Cinema (2025)
Witches, Zombies, and Cyborgs Re-enchanting the Ends of the World
The Anthropocene and the Undead (2024)
Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination
Dir. Simon Bacon
Postracial Fantasies and Zombies (2024)
On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World
Transnational Zombie Cinema, 2010 to 2020 (2023)
Readings in a Mutating Tradition
Prepare for Zombies, Survive a Flood (2023)
Natural Disaster Lessons from Undead Cinema
The Subversive Zombie (2018)
Social Protest and Gender in Undead Cinema and Television
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